Being Scott Densmore : Visual Studio

Unity Lives! Get your copy today.

scottdensmore — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:19:19 GMT

Awesome work by the entire team! You can get it from MSDN here or from CodePlex. Please discuss and provide feedback so we can make this even better. Objects of the code Unite! [I know, corny].

Also: I have built an extension to Unity that i will be blogging about over the weekend. This is an extension to do Interception (ala PIAB) that I ported from the ObjectBuilder work that Brad and I did.

Enjoy!

How to get Enterprise Library 3.1 working in VS 2008

scottdensmore — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:08:00 GMT

Enterprise Library 3.1 was published for Visual Studio 2005. That is to say: the Guidance Packages and the integrated Configuration Tool were built to work with Visual Studio 2005. The rest of the library works against .NET 2.0 and continues to work with .NET 3.5 apps.

We have done some work to get the integrated tool to work in Visual Studio 2008. If you run the following registry script it will change the keys where VS looks to load the integrated tool package. After you run the script, you will need to run devenv /setup from the Visual Studio 2008 command prompt.

You can download the file from the EntLibContrib project on CodePlex from here.

[edit]

I will try and be a little clearer for the steps:

1. Install EL 3.1 (you don't need the Guidance Packages)

2. Run the script

3. Run devenv /setup from the VS 2008 command prompt

Wheels from the album "Pressure Chief" by Cake

The Answer to "Why do my keys stop working in Visual Studio 2005 ?"

scottdensmore — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 03:47:14 GMT

We have been using Visual Studio 2005 for a while. We seem to keep having this problem with keys not working all of a sudden. The other day I came across this post that has the reason. Now I did not think anything about it until peterpr started to complain and said he wrote some macro to unbind / rebind all the keys. I looked at him and said binding had nothing to do with it, it was a focus problem. He immediately threw a pen at me and asked why I had not blogged it. Well here you go.

BTW : I have gotten into a bad habit of always calling people by their email alias’. It is common in Microsoft so everyone is now an alias.

Now playing: Luscious Jackson - Naked Eye

NUnit Converter V0.5

scottdensmore — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:40:24 GMT

NUnit convert V0.5 is out. We have been using it heavily to convert our tests to VSTS (which rocks!). BTW, don’t be scared we are going to try and ship the NUnit tests for EntLib, but they will be skewed for VSTS .

Go get V0.5 here.

Big thanks to Jim!

Now playing: Rage Against the Machine - Settle for Nothing

Composite UI Application Block Training

scottdensmore — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:38:50 GMT

The Composite UI Application Block is a cool new Application Block coming in the Whidbey time frame. We are now sitting in the war room with the guys because we want to keep the consistency and quality high for you guys by making sure things work together and that the teams learn from each other. Eugenio Pace, product manager, has a link for this here.

Application Blocks on .NET Compact Framework

scottdensmore — Fri, 13 May 2005 19:39:00 GMT

Straight from Sandy :

For any of you patterns & practices fans that have always wanted application blocks for devices, the p&p team worked with OpenNETCF to release a community version for the .NET Compact Framework.

For the blocks, you can go to: http://wow.opennetcf.Borg/appblocks/ and let us know what you think.

This is way cool! Go check it out.

Wojtek is Blogging!

scottdensmore — Tue, 03 May 2005 02:08:12 GMT

You don’t know Wojtek? Go read his blog. This guy is super smart (and quite amusing ).

Now playing: Fuel - Hemorrhage (In My Hands)

Visual Studio Team Developer - Undocumented feature in Unit Testing

scottdensmore — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:25:58 GMT

During my whirl-wind tour of Whidbey I am taking the ride using VSTD (there is a joke ther somewhere <STD>). Coming from NUnit / TDD.net and VS 2003, I was used to dealing with configuration through the configuration file myassembly.dll.config. Now that I am using the tests from VS and looking at the new System.Configuration goo (tech term), I thought this feature was gone because I could not find any documentation. Boy, was I wrong.

All you have to do is create an App.config file, rename it to your assembly name .dll.conig and set the file to always be copied (click file and then look at the properties window, there is a drop down for that option), and by magic, the test runner uses this file.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Now playing: King Crimson - Fallen Angel

Packaging Design and Architecture Guidance for Visual Studio

scottdensmore — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 23:36:53 GMT

Now that I have your attention … Tom is going to be giving a new webcast on a new “deliverable” from our group. I highly recommend you go check it out. Sign up for the webcast here.

Now playing: Queens of the Stone Age - Gonna Leave You

Little Know Component Model Gotcha with IDictionaryService

scottdensmore — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:27:00 GMT

I don’t know how many people in the world this gotcha will affect but I found it very interesting after a conversation with one of the devs internally so I thought I would share the information with those of you out there in the wild.

When you host your own components in a designer or IServiceContainer, the docs for the IDictionaryService state the following :

.NET Framework Class Library

IDictionaryService Interface

Provides a basic, component site-specific, key-value pair dictionary through a service that a designer can use to store user-defined data.

For a list of all members of this type, see IDictionaryService Members.

Now the documentation states that the service is for a designer, but in reality, the service has to be per ISite. This problem will not bite you in Everett (.NET 1.1), but in .NET 2.0, the caching is much more aggressive and it will have a type mismatch, especially when you are using the Property Grid.

All that being said, I am telling you this because when Enterprise Library is released and you compile it under .NET 2.0, when you use the designer… it will give you headaches and this is the reason why.

Now playing: Porno for Pyros - Pets

Why is Clean Project not a first class citizen

scottdensmore — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 16:19:00 GMT

I know this seems trivial, but since my move to the .NET world in Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), I sorely miss features from Visual C++ functionality. Now before I get to my point I want to give a little overview of how VS.NET works before getting to for those that don't know much about VS.NET. I will generalise and I of course don't work for the VS.NET team.

The VS.NET teams are all separate. Now this is because VS.NET is an extensible IDE. Not only do you have the Add-In model, you also have the VSIP functionality (which is my favorite and really gives the best explanation of how this works). The VSIP feature allows you to write packages. Packages are just plug-ins for the IDE that perform specific work (either UI or non-UI). For example Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual Basic .NET are all packages. This is why you can buy different versions of each product and get the same consistent look and feel. Now because each package is unique and separate, you get different functionality across the packages (aka refactoring in C#, unit testing in only the Burton Package etc).

Now back to my original point : Scott Hanselman has a post about a tool that allows you rid yourself of the files in the bin / obj directories. Why should we need this? VS.NET lists this menu item happily in my C# projects, but amazingly enough it doesn't do a darn thing. Seems a bit silly and trivial and yes there are bigger problems in the world to solve, but I miss clean.

Another Non Admin Woe in Visual Studio

scottdensmore — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:33:00 GMT

Today I needed to run some unit tests in an admin console (thanks to Aaron), so I fired up VS as admin and built the project and ran my tests. This was the first time I had built the project, so when I went back to loading VS as Non-Admin, I got an access denied when VS was trying to build the .resources file in the obj directory. How annoying. Now the reason for this is because by default Windows 2003 (my dev platform) takes ownership of files and other objects by the Administrators group. So as an admin, the file was owned by Administrators and I did not have access to the file anymore . Now you can change this policy to creator in Local Security Policy (secpol.msc) in the user rights assignment so I leave it up to you how you want to deal with this. Aaron has posts on this so you should give it a read before you make your decision.

Unit Testing Again...

scottdensmore — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:18:00 GMT

Looks like Jim Newkirk has put on his flame suit and headed out into the fire here on the unit testing debate. Since I work with Jim you can only imagine that I share his position.

To Unit Test or Not to Unit Test... which Visual Studio Version?

scottdensmore — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 06:41:00 GMT

Peter Provost has started a grass roots movement (aka petition) here to include Unit Testing in all the versions of Visual Studio.
Now seeing that I am an Microsoft Employee, I feel I must put in my 2 cents to defend the position of only including this in Visual Studio Team System. Programming is hard, I don’t think anyone disagrees. Unit Testing is one way to increase code confidence and reduce bugs. There are many other practices to help us (developers) make our code / products better. This is the goal of Team System: integrate these practices (Unit Testing, Stress Testing, Static Analysis, Work flow, Source Control, Code Coverage) so we can me more productive and better developers. So if all you want is Unit Testing is it because that is all you are doing? I doubt it. The integration is what makes Team System the price of admission.

I also am listing a pointer to Jason Anderson’s post that I think matches what I am saying.